Downers Grove

by Michael Hornburg

  “Do you have any homework?” I asked.

  “I have a big report due on youth-culture fiction.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Slow. I haven’t even gone to the library yet. It’s gonna take forever, but I have to finish it. My life will be over if I don’t graduate.” Tracy bit into one of her nonexistent fingernails. “It’s so hard to concentrate, knowing the curse is still hanging over us. When do you think it’s gonna happen?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. Everyone at school is totally freaked about the senior curse. For the past eight years, a member of the senior class has died before graduation, which is now only two weeks away. Nobody has died yet, but I can think of a few candidates. Last year, on prom night, a member of the soccer team was driving barefoot after a kegger and his car kissed the guardrail and did a couple 360s over the embankment. The year before, a girl drowned in the quarries. There was a suicide once, back when I was in junior high, but the rest have been car accidents as far as I can remember. We’ve been drilled to death about drinking and driving by the school counselors. Last week the state police brought in the crash simulator so we could have a real taste of blood and guts, but when they showed the movie and the car exploded into a ball of flames all the kids in the auditorium cheered. They show the same film year after year. What do they expect?

  At last year’s sobfest the class president read a poem that went something like “don’t try to understand everything because some things don’t make sense.” I can’t tell you how many times someone used that as an answer in one of my classes this year. It should be our yearbook motto. My classmates are starting to place bets on all the losers, but deep inside they’re getting sorta paranoid as well.

  “I just hope they don’t cancel graduation,” Tracy said. “I’d feel so empty being thrown into society without a ceremony.”

  Tracy and I were making collages for our fanzine As My Stomach Turns, an after-school project that has ballooned into a major time consumer. We started it when the school paper didn’t report the shooting in the parking lot: Some sophomore math whiz went postal and blew away a few hall monitors and a gym coach before ramming the gun into his own mouth and making spaghetti of what was left of his mind. He was part of a crowd that sprinkled angel dust on their Wheaties, the spiritual leader of some thick-headed glue-sniffing satanists who liked to mutilate small animals after school. Tracy recorded some interviews on her Walkman and transcribed them word for word, then pasted them into columns and illustrated it with snapshots she took with a disposable camera. (I liked the one of me standing in front of the gunman’s locker.) We made a bunch of copies at her mom’s office.

  Our little rag has a total circulation of about fifty copies, but that’s only because we’re more interested in designing the next issue then distributing the old one. Xeroxing is a drag. Our current issue is centered around astrological predictions about the curse, which we obtained from a psychic in California by dialing a 900 number, and our only letter (from a guy!), which asked, “What should I do if I get a boner in the shower after gym class?”

  Tracy and I combed the yearbook twice trying to figure out who might be gay. We tried to match the handwriting to signatures from last year and the year before that. Nobody has ever come out of the closet at our high school, because they know they would die. Which means our next issue will be highly controversial. Tracy says we might get suspended and then we could protest and become international media darlings for taking a stand against the evil marauders that run our school system, but my fear is that a few morons will use the issue as an excuse for a witch-hunt and there might be some misguided bloodshed over rumors and innuendo. Either way the sensational aspect of our coverage will ensure another sellout, and we’ll be stealing as many free copies from Kinko’s as possible in a matter of days.

  One night I was baby-sitting at the neighbor’s house and they have a computer, so As My Stomach Turns went global over the Internet. We posted X-rated letters to rock stars. Tracy lied and said she was a sixteen-year-old model itching to lose her virginity. One guy wrote back and asked her to describe the girls’ locker room at school. Which of course she did—in livid detail, going off on this huge lie about having her underwear stolen and spending the entire day without panties. Tracy’s posting got about a zillion responses from perverts all across the universe. At first she was real proud of her sexual conquest, but later she started getting paranoid and told me some creep followed her through the lingerie department at Wal-Mart.

  I’ve known Tracy since forever. When we first met on the grade-school playground she shined like a quarter you find under a couch cushion. She bleached and ironed my hair, got me started as a vegan, and sorta introduced me to sex. Tracy was the beacon that helped advertise my desire. She has an amazing ability to get attention, but she’s more talk than action. Tracy is a chronic serial crusher and gets the itch to ditch a guy as soon as she snags him, but if she feels even the slightest tremor of lust she’s on the phone burning a hole in my eardrum. Talking is her Valium.

  “Did you hear that?” Tracy asked.

  “Hear what?”

  Tracy tilted her ear downward, as if she were trying to tune in some fading frequency leaking from the basement. “Nothing, I guess.” She went back to work with the scissors.

  Tracy’s had a major crush on my brother since the day her eyes landed in his airport, and his constant indifference is the equivalent of throwing petroleum on a brush fire. Her devotion has synthesized into a cultish groupie eulogy. She arrives on our doorstep with the regularity of a commuter train, acting like some lost princess looking for her misplaced shoe. David somehow fits into her tidy mold of an alternative grungelord. Mr. Depression, however, is not into girls right now. He’d rather stay in the basement like some musty old troll and snort heroin with his stupid friends. The four of them sit around a card table every weekend playing gin rummy, blasting their records so loud the neighbor told the cops it was drowning out his lawn mower.

  The deck of playing cards is as dirty and frayed as everything else in the basement. One day, the jack of spades tore in half, and so my brother taped it back together, then tore up all the other jacks and taped them up too. So now everybody knows you have a jack, but not which suit. It’s the stupid kind of logic he and his friends have for everything. My brother’s been keeping score since they were fourteen, and at a penny a point he thinks he might be able to retire at thirty-four. And sometimes I wonder if it’s not true: not the retirement, but the fact that they’ll still be down there fifteen years from now.

  “Is your brother gonna start a new band?” Tracy asked.

  “He says he doesn’t want to go commercial.”

  “Starting a band would be a sellout?”

  “According to him, the only way to be alternative is to not participate.”

  Tracy leaned her head back toward the door in that solemn gushing hush, so respectful, so willing, way of hers.

  My brother’s old band, GLOOM, broke up after the lead singer hung himself. Joey’s suicide note declared his weakness his greatest strength, and his death his greatest artistic achievement. The guy had dirty ears, that’s all I remember about him. Tracy never got over it and still whispers whenever she talks about him.

  “So what’s going on with you and the mechanic?” Tracy asked. “Have you taken the car in for a tune-up yet?” She worked the scissors around a dELiA*s supermodel, anxious for some lurid details, which I usually made up for her carnivorous needs.

  “I did a drive-by in Mom’s car.”

  “And?”

  “He had his shirtsleeves rolled up.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Well at least you could’ve stopped for gas.”

  “I can’t get gas every day!”

  “Why not? It’s a free country.”

  One day we were bored out of our minds, cruising aimlessly in Tracy’s bug when the mechanic rolled up beside us at a s
top light in his awesome purple Charger. I was sitting there checking him out, so Tracy beeped her horn and finally he glanced over at me. We locked into a momentary stare, but when the light turned green he burned a fat patch of rubber right beside us. It was definitely one of those looks like, someday, somewhere, something’s gonna happen, but when I stopped for gas a few days later he acted as if I were the invisible girl.

  Tracy started arranging her cutouts on a sheet of newspaper. The cover story was about that plane crash in Wisconsin. The headline said 75 SECONDS OF HORROR! in bold type. I stared at the picture of the wreckage. The little pieces reminded me of dinosaur bones found in an archaeological dig. A woman’s dress hung from the limb of a tree, and I wondered if I could ever be that woman, my remains indistinguishable from hundreds of others, lost in the debris, scattered forever.

  “We gotta go,” Tracy said, “the movie starts in ten minutes.” She tossed the glue stick into my lunch box, stood up, brushed paper scraps from her skirt and picked little pieces off her sweater, then grabbed her blue suede jacket. I got up, twisted the sleeves of my black sweater around my waist, checked to make sure we didn’t forget the cigarettes, then turned off my bedroom light.

  Tracy drove us to see Kurt and Courtney at Meadowbrook Mall. She had an ancient red Volkswagen Beetle. Her dad left it behind as part of his guilt trip when he ran off with the hussy of his dreams. All my dad left me were his scratched-up bongo records, embarrassing leftovers of his beatnik hour. Her feet barely reached the pedals, but she drove like a maniac. The mall was only five minutes away. Tracy made it in three. We smoked the rest of my allowance in the parking lot before going into the theater, and I was swimming in it by the time we bought our tickets.

  We flashed our stubs to the usher and slipped between the folds of red velvet curtain. My eyes took forever to adjust and I wobbled through the darkness. Tracy marched up front so the screen was right in our face. The place was pretty much deserted, except for a clan of jocks munching popcorn toward the back.

  The movie started, and before long my stomach started doing flip-flops, so I went and sat in the lobby. The carpeting had one of those geometric patterns, and I tried following it, like a race car speeding through a video game, but when the room began to swallow itself I ducked into the bathroom and leaned over the toilet bowl for a while. There goes potluck. Afterward I felt a million times better, bought a small Coke to rinse my mouth, then went back into the theater.

  Tracy was front and center, curled into a fetal position, squeezing her toes, her glassy eyes in deep focus. I handed her my Coke, and she grabbed at the straw like someone who just came back from the moon, sucked the whole thing down to one last giant gurgle of ice and backwash, then gave it back to me. I set the cup on the floor.

  The movie made me sad. Everyone in it looked like they’d just survived a train wreck, everyone except Courtney that is. Tracy, however, was on a whole other wavelength. She studied the movie as if it were some kind of how-to manual for boys with guitars strapped over their waists. She felt destined to marry one and took every opportunity to learn more about them, as if she had cast herself in her own movie and was just waiting for the shooting to begin.

  When the house lights came on, Tracy rubbed her hands on her tights, then tucked them under her sweater. “I’m freezing,” she said. I followed her up the aisle and through the lobby, squinting in the harsh light, careful to avoid the mob of head-shaved jocks crowding into the John. We crossed the barren parking lot. A thin layer of dew covered the cars, and the lights hanging overhead shone with the lonely afterglow of day’s end. Tracy’s VW started right up and she cranked the heat. The weed was wearing off, the depression starting to simmer, slowly creeping back into my life. Tracy turned on the windshield wipers, lit a cigarette, then the whole car started shaking and tilting like that little girl’s bed in The Exorcist. I rolled down my window and saw a pack of all-stars rocking the rear bumper of the car. Their leader tapped on Tracy’s window. She rolled it down and blew smoke in his face.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” Tracy asked.

  “Evening ladies.” He waved the smoke away. “Looking for an adventure?”

  “What are you—a travel agent?” she asked.

  “There’s a killer party around the corner. You should come check it out.” He winked at Tracy. “Unless, of course, you two just want to be alone.”

  “We’ll think about it.” Tracy rolled up her window, then looked over at me with one of her sex-crazed looks. The quarterback batted the top of the VW and danced back over to his blue Camaro. His cronies piled in one after another.

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “No way.”

  “Let’s just check it out,” she said.

  “I’m tired of trolling cul-de-sacs. He isn’t even my type’s most distant relative.”

  “Maybe he has a cousin or an uncle. Think of it as shopping, if nothing fits we’ll go somewhere else.”

  I just wanted to go home, but Tracy had her own ideas, following a car full of drunken football players through silent subdivisions. I pleaded, but Tracy insisted, so we ended up at some shabby duplex behind a strip mall called Willow Creek. The apartments were faux ski lodge—very seventies. You could hear the music in the parking lot, an empty keg was lying at the bottom of the stairs, a fresh puddle of puke on the first landing.

  “Looks promising,” I sneered.

  Tracy held my hand as we entered the apartment and dragged me directly toward the kitchen. Green Day was blasting. A few murky lights burned in the corners. There were lots of bodies, lots of sweaty faces, but nobody I recognized from school. A few rocker sluts were pinned down in the corners giving face to major scum.

  “Where are we?” I shouted over the music.

  “It’s some poor idiot’s idea of a bachelor pad.” Tracy shrugged her shoulders and pointed to the Bud babe poster taped to the wood-paneled wall. “I think his name is Chuck or something.”

  “And what kind of guy is Chuck?” I asked.

  “Probably an ex-football player who didn’t get a scholarship and is now doing time at the local community college, trying to get his grades up for a shot at state college in two years. Maybe he’ll even make something of himself as long as he doesn’t kill anybody in the meantime.” Tracy went straight for the refrigerator, which was scarfed down to a torn open twelve-pack of Milwaukee’s Best. Tracy took two and handed me one. I scanned the room and began sorting through the dismal prospects. The problem with jocks is that they’re as interchangeable as a lightbulb. And when they look at you at this time of night it’s with only one purpose in mind. Gross.

  “Tastes like Lake Michigan,” Tracy said, looking at the can.

  I opened the freezer. “What do you suppose is in those plastic containers?” I asked.

  “Body parts,” some fathead said, butting in to grab a beer.

  “How come looking around this room gives me very little reason to doubt you?” I asked.

  “Maybe you watch too many scary movies,” he said.

  “Or lived them.” Tracy began drifting away.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Over there.” She pointed toward the couch. “You still know how to scream don’t you?”

  I leaned against the kitchen counter trying to look ugly when Mr. Body Parts started hitting on me like I owed him something for the beer. He was an overweight musclehead with little or no understanding of his incredible lack of charm.

  “I’m Chuck. Who are you?” He let out a huge belch, popping his beer can open one-handed.

  “I’m gone.” I turned and headed for the bathroom which, thank God, nobody had puked in yet. I sat on the toilet, but was totally pee shy. My limbs felt cold, and I wished I was at home curled under my sheets sleeping toward tomorrow.

  Someone hurriedly pounded on the door, so I pulled my corduroys up, flushed the toilet, and opened the door. Chuck comes barreling in and locks the door behind him. Fatso’s got a big drunken date-rape grin leaking a
cross his face, and he’s acting all superior, like maybe he’s too good for me and I’m about to get lucky.

  “We meet again,” he says.

  “We say good-bye again.” I tried getting around him, but he stood in the way and stared at my breasts like the vacant drooling ape that he was.

  “What’s your hurry?” he asked.

  “Well, to be honest, I really don’t want to watch you pee.”

  “What are you doing in here then?”

  “I’m not here, it’s just an illusion.” I tried getting past him again, but he pinned me against the towel rack, pressed his nose against mine to advertise his psycho capabilities.

  “You feel like you’re here to me.” He laughed, as if the two sides of his brain were trying to outwit each other, then he grabbed my waist and pushed his against mine, so I could feel the merchandise packed under his denim jeans. He looked compulsive and prone to irrational ideas, someone who might prove very harmful if not handled with the utmost care.

  When his hand slid up my arm and over my breast I stepped back and kicked him in the balls as hard as I could. He buckled under, screamed “Bitch!” like it was my fault or something, and crumpled onto the floor. He grabbed my left leg and tried to tackle me, so I stomped on his head with the other one. I didn’t care what happened to his face. I just kept on kicking him over and over again until shiny drops of red blood dotted the linoleum floor. When his hand finally loosened its grip, I unlocked the door and excused myself. I hurried through the kitchen, found Tracy on the couch squeezed between the quarterback and some other steakhead. A pyramid of empty beer cans were stacked in front of her.

  “Tracy,” I said. She pretended not to hear me.

  “Tracy!” I screamed. “We have to leave!”